Along with what orthonormal said, I definitely think that up until ~1960, the Nobel Prize committee was very careful, in all categories, not to give the award to a person of “ill repute”, which includes, among other things, being gay. So Nobel Prize winnings wouldn’t be informative.
However, you could control for this by checking out how many men won the prize before 1960, and would be suspected of being gay (i.e. old and never-married).
I would go with general metrics of ‘influence’ like in Murray’s _Human Accomplishment_. It’s easier to decide not to give someone a prize because you find them skeevy than it is to ignore their work and accomplishments in practice and to keep them out of the histories and reference works.
Along with what orthonormal said, I definitely think that up until ~1960, the Nobel Prize committee was very careful, in all categories, not to give the award to a person of “ill repute”, which includes, among other things, being gay. So Nobel Prize winnings wouldn’t be informative.
However, you could control for this by checking out how many men won the prize before 1960, and would be suspected of being gay (i.e. old and never-married).
Can you think of a better list, or is the entire question non-empirical in practice?
I would go with general metrics of ‘influence’ like in Murray’s _Human Accomplishment_. It’s easier to decide not to give someone a prize because you find them skeevy than it is to ignore their work and accomplishments in practice and to keep them out of the histories and reference works.